[From Tim Carey (981127.0800)]
Recently I purchased a book Bruce G recommended a while ago called Creating Mind: How the brain works. I have a really appalling knowledge of neuroscience (I used to sleep through my neuropsychology lectures) but as I learn more about PCT it’s become more and more important to me to understand bits about the brain.
It’s a really great book for the most part. It’s well written and very easy to understand. I’m probably learning a bit as well which is nice.
Perhaps the experience of greatest interest to me while I’ve been reading the book however is how consumed people seem to be about finding explanations for the motor output we produce. Even though I’ve heard Bill and Rick and Tom talk about the situation at length, it is still surprising to me to find out just how entrenched it is. Control of perceptual input seems so obvious to me now it’s hard to believe that other people don’t see it too (pretty egocentric huh ;-))
I’ll leave you with a quote from chapter 2:
“The challenge today is to understand how aggregates of nerve cells interact to produce meaningful patterns of neural activity and control ultimately the behavior of an animal. How does the activity of and interactions between neurons give rise to seemingly simple behaviors such as walking, swimming, and moving one’s eyes?”
Cheers,
Tim
[From Tim Carey (981127.08100]
Even though I’m supposed to be at the end of my internship I don’t have quite enough hours yet so I’ve taken on another client.
This guy is wonderful. He’s a 72 year old man. He’s been married for 46 years and has 2 grown sons. His reason for referral was apparently Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and trauma. I’ve seen him twice so far, once on Tuesday for an intake interview and once yesterday (Thursday) for our first session.
Session 1:
I just tried to get as much detail from him as I could regarding the nature of his problems. Essentially he said his main problem was that he moved things. If he put a pen down, for example, he would straight away hear a voice telling him to move it. If he moved it then everything was fine. If he ignored the voice it went away after about 5 minutes but then the next time he put something down the voice came back and told him to move it again. If he ignores it on this occasion, he gets the idea that something dreadful is going to happen to someone in his family and if he ignores this then the voice gets more specific and names someone in his family who the disaster will happen to. The disaster won’t involve death but it will be serious injury. He says he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t move something and one of his sons had a car accident. He also said that he gets really mad at himself for not having the guts to not move it. He just thinks he should give himself a good shake. He said that he thought he moved things about 12 times a day.
Another problem that he talked about that he saw as being unrelated had to do with his time in the army. He joined the army at the end of WWII and spent many months doing infantry training. As he was lying in the trenches and practicing with the bayonettes he said he used to wonder whether he’d ever be able to use the bayonette and if he’d let his mates down. The war finished just after he’d completed his training and so he never went into action.
Now, however, he finds that he can’t go to gatherings of army people or he just breaks down. He also said that a couple of times a week he gets the idea that he’s living in a dream and he hears his mother telling him to wake up and go back to the army. He says it’s like he’s 19 again.
He told me that he’d had these problems (especially the moving problem) for about 30 years but he’d only just told his family.
Session 2:
I started the session by explaining a bit about MOL and what I saw my role as. He said he understood this and that it made sense. I also said we would have 4 sessions and then evaluate how we’re going and if we need to have anymore. This is partly because he is on a pension and said that he would have trouble paying for lots of sessions, but in truth, I really want the time limit for myself. With my past clients I think I spent too much time waffling. I’m trying a time limit to see if it will help me “focus”.
I also asked him what brought him to therapy after all these years. He said that he and his wife and some friends had been planning a holiday. The friends were insistent about driving a particular route that this fellow did not want to take. After a telephone conversation with them about this, he went downstairs and just started crying, something he had never done before. As he was crying he was thinking “Why do I always have to do what other people want me to do”. His wife came downstairs and saw him like this. He then told her about his troubles and she told him to go to the doctor who then referred him to me.
I told him that in the sessions we would just talk about whatever was on his mind. This week he said that he was having trouble making a decision about which garage to put his car into. He would decide to put it into one and then he would start thinking about the advantages of putting it into another. This toing and froing would go on for a while and then he would tell himself: “Don’t be so ridiculous, just make a decision”. We spent a while talking about this and the idea about him being ridiculous or being an idiot kept coming out. I felt like this was an up-a-level kind of comment but I really didn’t feel like I did much with it.
I guess at this stage of my MOL learning I feel that I’m OK at getting a lot of stuff out on the table and preparing the way for an up-a-level comment but I’m still not great at chatting about the ual comment when it appears (and it most always appears). I taped the session though and I haven’t watched it yet so I may get some ideas when I do that.
One thing that did come up in the session that just blew me away occurred toward the end of the session. I asked him about his moving things and what was happening with that. He just stopped and thought and said “You know, I haven’t moved anything since I saw you last. Hmmm I hadn’t even realised that I’d stopped moving.” I don’t know whether this will last or not but for me it was significant that he’d gone 48 hours without moving anything when he previously described moving things up to 12 times a day for 30 years. I was also interested in the fact that he hadn’t even realised it.
Cheers,
Tim